Chapter Forty
Cait
Diane's verdict came on Saturday morning via text, which was Diane's preferred medium for conclusions she had reached and did not wish to debate.
The text said: He'll do. Three words. From Diane, this was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
Cait sat at her kitchen table with her coffee and read it three times and then set the phone down and looked at the alley, which had more green in it now, the weed joined by something with small yellow flowers that had appeared overnight in the way of things that had been waiting for the right conditions.
She called Petrov.
"Kelleher," she said. "I want to start the renewal negotiations this week. Before the end of the month."
"The term doesn't expire until July."
"I know. I want the renewal signed before the liaison term ends in May. Protects the arrangement regardless of any board-level changes."
Petrov was quiet for a moment with the quality of someone who was noting something he had expected. "And Knox."
"Will be in Chicago after May in a different capacity. Not as liaison." She picked up her coffee. "The Kelleher renewal is about the plant, Petrov. It stands on its own."
"I know it does," he said. "I was asking for my own information."
"I know you were." She drank the coffee. "He's staying. I wanted you to hear it from me."
A pause. Then: "Good." The same word Diane had used, the same weight behind it, the specific approval of people who had watched her work for years and understood what it meant that she had let something in.
She called Kelleher's office at nine-thirty and arranged a meeting for the following Tuesday.
She spent the rest of Saturday morning going through the renewal terms she wanted to achieve: a fifteen percent volume increase, a three-year term instead of one, a price escalation clause tied to the infrastructure contract index rather than a fixed percentage.
She wrote three pages of notes and then reviewed them with the red pen she kept for exactly this purpose, marking the positions she would move on and the ones she would not.
She was at the plant by noon. She went to the small office and hung up her coat and sat at the wobbling desk and opened her laptop.
She heard him on the stairs at twelve-fifteen.
He knocked. She said come in. He came in and sat in the chair that did not wobble and looked at her with the grey-eyed attention she had stopped categorising somewhere around week three and had simply accepted as a fact of being in his company.
"Diane," he said.
"Three words. High praise."
"What were the three words."
"He'll do."
He sat with this for a moment. She watched him decide not to be visibly pleased, which he managed with limited success. "I'll take it," he said.
"You should." She turned back to her laptop. "The Kelleher renewal. Tuesday. I want you to review the terms before I go in."
"Send them over."
"I will." She looked at him. "And Garrett."
"Yes."
"She said don't be a mistake. On the way out. I assume she said something like that."
He looked at her. "Something like that."
"And."
"I told her I didn't intend to be." He held her eyes. "I don't."
She looked at him for a moment, this man at the desk in the room that had a wobbling chair and an intermittent radiator and a view of the secondary parking lot, this man who had arrived in November to close a factory and had stayed because the data was right and because she was here and because he had decided, without fanfare or uncertainty, that this was the direction he was going in.
"Good," she said. Which was the word Diane had used and the word Petrov had used and which carried the same weight each time: the weight of something settled.
She went back to the Kelleher renewal terms. He went back to his room at the end of the corridor. The radiator in her office moved into one of its warm intervals and stayed there longer than usual, as if it too had decided something.
She worked through the afternoon. At four-thirty she had the full negotiating position ready: primary terms, fallback positions, the one clause she would not move on.
She had been doing this work for six years and she could feel when a document was ready the way she could feel when an argument was complete. This one was complete.
She printed it and put it in the folder with the handwritten tabs, which had been in her canvas bag since November, which had held the original analysis and the BLS methodology and the infrastructure contract data and the state grant documents and the pension variant and the proposal that Hale had read and the Crestline files and the counter-arguments for Section 14 and now the Kelleher renewal terms. The folder had done a great deal of work.
She thought it had a few more documents in it yet.
Outside, down on the floor, the Schuler press ran its steady percussion, the same sound it had made in November and December and January and February and March and which it would make in April and May and June and well beyond, the sound of a thing built to last doing exactly what it was built to do.